• Happy tidings to start the week. Lord Mandelson, the former cabinet and EU minister, spinner par excellence, aka the Prince of Darkness, appears to be thriving in the economic gloom. He's expanding his global consultancy business. From the Estates Gazette, we learn that he has instructed James Andrew International to find a new headquarters for his consultancy business, Global Counsel. "The business, set up in 2010 and backed by advertising giant WPP, wants to expand from its offices at No 1 Knightsbridge Green, SW1, to a 5,000 sq ft HQ in Marylebone, W1," the magazine reports. "The space is needed to accommodate growth plans for Global Counsel, which turns over around £2m a year." There's a lot of money in being a fighter and not a quitter.

• A lot of money. Lord Mandelson does love a lot of money. And he loves stuff. A lot of stuff. I discuss this with my colleague Martin Wainwright, who in the past piloted your diary with some distinction and who would, on occasion, report the reflections of the even then sharp-eyed Mandelson, as a councillor in the London borough of Lambeth. At that time those who assisted our search for truth and justice were rewarded with a Guardian diary badge: metal, bright yellow and shaped like a banana. Months passed, and though deserving, Mandelson felt overlooked. "Where is my banana," he wrote on council headed notepaper. We have the letter still. The wrong was righted. Even then he was a fighter not a quitter.

• Strange happenings, meanwhile, in the bowels of London in the small hours of Sunday morning. Not just the fact that a steam engine was taking passengers down the tunnels of the underground for the first time in more than 100 years, in a test run for London Underground's 150-year celebrations in January. But the identity of the VIP guests. Amid a select bunch of transport bigwigs, historians, PRs and press were a couple of special dignitaries aboard the Victorian first-class carriage: rail enthusiast Sir William McAlpine, brother of the wronged Lord McAlpine; and the man now responsible for those who wronged him, new BBC director general Tony Hall. Where better to bury the hatchet than at 3am on the Metropolitan line? And on a train from the 19th century – long before Jimmy Savile was hired to promote "the age of the train". All history now, of course.

• And it's game on in the battle between the very wronged Lord McAlpine and Sally Bercow, the incontinent tweetress and wife of the Commons Speaker, John Bercow. McAlpine has now lodged his libel writ and seeks £50,000 worth of redress. For her part, Bercow has instructed old hands Carter Ruck to defend her. Both sides have their detractors and supporters, and it may cheer Sally to know that she has the anarchists in her corner. The "instant response unit" of Sabcat Printing, the Walsall-based anarchist workers' co-op, has produced a supportive T-shirt. "Sally Bercow – Innocent Face" styles her as Che Guevara, and Class War founder Ian Bone is promoting them via his website. This may be the support she hoped for. It may not.

• Finally, just when we think we know all there is to know about the Conservative talisman and mayor of London, Boris Johnson, fresh info comes to light. What did you hope to do with your life, asked the author Dominic Shelmerdine, compiling the forthcoming edition of his book series, My Original Ambition, Letters from Persons of Consequence? Boris takes the bait. "My original ambition was to become a billionaire proprietor of a multiple-brand retail empire and the Jimmy Goldsmith of my generation! Something went wrong," he says. Still, he isn't doing badly, by that yardstick. He has oodles of cash, just as Jimmy did; and one may think, looking at the BBC's description of Goldsmith, that there are other similarities. "His family life was complex and a source of envy. At weekends he lived with his second wife, Ginette, and their two children in Paris and during the week with Lady Annabel Birley, who would later have three children by him." Wealth, power, domestic complexity; they would have had much to talk about. Things haven't gone as "wrong" as Boris thinks.